Syntactic language features of word problems have often been identified by assessment studies and interview studies as potential obstacles in word problem solving. However, students' processes of noticing and interpreting these features have only rarely been investigated in depth because noticing is hard to investigate. Eye-tracking methodology…

Prosodic features in spontaneous speech help disambiguate implied meaning not explicit in linguistic surface structure, but little research has examined how these signals manifest themselves in real conversations. Spontaneously produced verbal irony utterances generated between familiar speakers in conversational dyads were acoustically analyzed…

The major portion of this paper is devoted to delineate the types of errors made by Arab learners of English in the area of the article system. By so doing, the paper classifies learners' errors according to the Surface Structure Taxonomies of errors, and illustrates the possible sources of these errors. In order to overcome learners' difficulties…

Within linguistics, words with a complex internal structure are commonly assumed to be decomposed into their constituent morphemes (e.g., un-help-ful). Nevertheless, an ongoing debate concerns the brain structures that subserve this process. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging, the present study varied the internal complexity of derived…

Gives some examples of internal contradictions in the use of the Spanish subjunctive. Details these contradictions to show there is only a tenuous relationship between surface forms and semantic features and categories. (EKN)

The dependency approach to grammar, in which it is assumed that grammatical relations can be described in terms of a relation between two element types, a head and a dependent, is discussed in the context of Arabic. Operational criteria used for defining the notions of head and dependency are reviewed, and claims for the usefulness of recognizing…

Two experiments showed that functional completeness--the explicit propositional surface realization of deep-structure clause relations--isolated effective and integral comprehension units, which definitions of comprehension units couched in levels of syntactic structure failed to do. (Author/RL)

Analysis of the deep structure of certain Tagalog sentences reveals buried agents. In Tagalog, verbs are inflected for the case role of the subject Noun Phrase (NP). However, Tagalog contains many sentences which, on the surface, do not appear to adhere to this rule, because they are missing the agent. Among sentences which deviate from the rule…

Five studies were carried out to analyze role of short-term storage in reading of organized text. By interrupting the subject's reading with a distractor task, information that was being carried in short-term storage was removed. It was found that this interruption effect could be countered by giving the subject the last one or two sentences that…

A comparison of the difficulty in underlying structure of basal reading texts with the difficulty in surface structure raises questions on the validity of the Fry Readability Formula and other traditional readability formulas. (CJ)

Minor grammatical errors made by German students in translating from English to German led to an investigation of the means available in the two languages for effecting text-coherence. The examples cited indicate that English has fewer possibilities than German for showing sentence perspective through surface-syntactical markers. (IFS/WGA)

Two experiments and two questionnaire studies investigated the processing of sluiced sentences among college student participants. Results show that, because the interpretation of a sluiced constituent takes place at the representational level of logical form (LF), implicit arguments are not made explicit at LF, but focus is important in the…

This report describes part of a longer study on sentence comprehension. The long range goal is to identify distinct levels of processing in terms of the types of linguistic and extralinguistic information each level uses. The focus of this part of the study is sentences with filler-gap relations, such as, "This is the girl the teacher wanted to…

Piaget's research on the processes and products of cognitive and representational development in early childhood is employed to outline the bases of early language development. The processes of assimilation and accommodation, leading to horizontal decalage; empirical and reflective abstraction, resulting in schemas and schemes; as well as…

Research has identified three reading strategies that are affected in various ways by signaling--the emphasis of superordinate relationships in text. Using a structure strategy, readers follow the text's superordinate relations to focus on the text's message and how it relates to supportive details. Readers who use the detail/list strategy focus…